Home Front

This resource is aimed at secondary school students and contains over 20 pages of activities.

The online materials draw on the rich collection of photos and the brief history provided in the Australians in World War I: Home Front commemorative publication, which was printed in early 2012 and is the fifth and final book in the series.

Chapter 7: The great recruiting drive (1915)

‘I am going to avenge Ozzie’, one man declared amid the rush to enlist.1 is simple determination would have pleased the recruiting committees forming across Australia to lift even further the number of men in uniform. Huge posters soon plastered town halls, office buildings and railway stations, begging, accusing, frightening and ‘an insult to anyone of intelligence’ according to the novelist Martin Boyd.2 They were effective nonetheless. ‘Australia has promised Britain 50,000 more men’, one screamed at passers-by: ‘Will YOU help us keep that promise?’3

Equally effective was the pressure some people put on others to enlist. A group of fathers in Murray Bridge decided to ‘march en masse to homes where boys had not left for the front to plead with the families to allow their sons to go’.4Some women posted white feathers to men they called shirkers. More charming were the little ‘snowball marches’ of the summer of 1915–16 that tramped through rural New South Wales under names like ‘Kangaroos’ and ‘Waratahs’, ‘Cooees’ and ‘Boomerangs’, calling on locals to join them on their way to the recruiting depot. When the white-hatted, sore-footed Kangaroos marched into the tiny town of Galong on a December afternoon they were met by a councillor and a flock of locals. ‘Sunday was a great day’ for the town, a reporter announced after the Kangaroos were joined by dozens of railway workers—‘fine physical giants, who can dig trenches, and for whom the hot sun has no terrors’.5 Around 1500 men joined marches like this and went to war singing.

The names of these and other recruits began to be recorded on wooden ‘Honor Rolls’ put up on walls by schools, councils and churches. Women began wearing enamel brooches representing the battalion their son or husband belonged to. Some women wrote to men in uniform on behalf of mothers who could not put onto paper what was in their hearts. The soldiers’ replies could be unsettling. ‘I read two letters from Gallipoli from boys I don’t know written to their Mothers’, Agnes Miller of Mosman in Sydney recorded, and what they wrote seemed ‘so real & dreadful & inhuman[,] & life & death seemed so akin’.6 In such ways, and despite the censors, Australians began to learn the truth about the war.

6. Miller to Olaf Stapledon, 4 October 1915, in Robert Crossley ed., Letters Across the World: the love letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, New South Wales University press, Sydney, 1988, p. 105.